George A Romero's Land of the Dead Interview Greg Nicotero (Special Effects Makeup Supervisor) INTERVIEWER Are you going to redefine the look of zombies? Is there anything different from what we might have seen before? GREG NICOTERO My first movie with George was Day of the Dead. On that film, we had taken the zombies to a level of decay, using browns and a lot of little pustule areas. They all had really bad teeth and no eyebrows. Every time you look at a zombie in older movies, the prosthetics cover the eyebrows. So all of a sudden you turn into a zombie and you lose your eyebrows. We really wanted to stay with a completely different color palette than we had used before. We went more with the sort of sickly pale yellows. We didn't want to build the foreheads of a lot of the zombies out because then they tend to look a little caveman-ish, so we went with a lot of cheekbone pieces and nose bridge pieces to make the area look kind of sunken and sullen. Every zombie has contact lenses so the life is taken out of the eyes. One thing you always notice about all of George's zombie movies is that you see the life in a person's eyes. The zombie is doing his walk and he's looking around, and it just feels alive.  We designed about 12 different looks. Some of the ones we did for the featured zombies are blood shot on the outside with a yellow color across the inside. Some of them are a lot harder to see out of because we went for that cloudy diseased look. And some of them are pretty easy to see out of. We didn't want to go with your standard white lenses with a little hole in the middle because it wasn't the look we were going for. It looks like you're dealing with what looks like makeup or somebody wearing a prosthetic. So we went along that route because we wanted the zombies to just look different. Aside from that, we did a lot of puppet stuff where we actually created five different looks for very, very emaciated zombies that could never be a person in makeup. The noses are missing, the jawbones are missing, and there are pieces of them missing. They still have enough movement to look around and move around. They are all radio-controlled animatronic heads, and then there are some in-between versions. Some are fresher zombies and then you'll see some that have a lot more decay. A lot of hero zombies, like Big Daddy, aren't too rotted. Other zombies get more of a rotted and decayed treatment, utilizing brown blood. On top of the contact lenses and all the prosthetic stuff, we went with more of a grey-black denture. The gums pretty much go black and the teeth sort of turn grey. A lot of times you'll see movies and when they put dentures in, the dentures force everyone's upper lip out and it looks unnatural. So, we designed some really thin vacuform dentures, as well as something as simple as making black mouthwash to rinse people's tongues so their tongues were black. If you see them open their mouths, there's no sense of life or anything redRed or alive looking, except for any blood they may have on them. The funniest thing about this movie is that the first night we did a hundred zombies. The second night we did a hundred zombies. A lot of people don't realize that when you look at Night of the Living Dead or Dawn of the Dead, it starts in the farmhouse, or the mall, or the missile silo, and you have one or two zombies, then four or five zombies a little later, and then eight or nine zombies. By the end of the movie, you have a hundred zombies besieging the farmhouse. At the end of Dawn of the Dead, you have hundreds of zombies taking over the mall. In this movie, we start with hundreds of zombies and the world's basically been overrun. In scene one, you see Union Town, Pennsylvania and our heroes are looking through binoculars at this small picturesque village that's overrun with zombies. We started with that and then just built from there. Fortunately, with the technology of CGI, you're able to shoot a hundred zombies and make them look like five hundred zombies, or one thousand zombies, and to us that's really exciting because of the idea that you'll be able to see shots of the zombies advancing on the city. It's not just going to look like there are 50 or 60 of them. There'll be thousands of them lining up along the river, marching to the city with the camera behind them, and then you'll see thousands of zombies who are walking toward their final goal. INTERVIEWER Do you feel like you're in the shadow of Tom Savini in a way? GREG NICOTERO Not at all. As a matter of fact, Tom was my mentor. He and George Romero gave me my first job. I spoke with Tom a lot about the effects for the film and he came up to visit several times. The thing he kept telling me was that George Romero never had zombies like this before. Tom was excited about what we were doing and I was sending him photos of the makeup tests and the designs we did. We did a lot of stuff using dentures on different actors that would go outside of their faces. The teeth would travel on the outside and then you put a prosthetic over the top of that and tear chunks of it away.  So, it looks like you're looking through the skin at the jawbone and at the teeth and it was really effective. Again, like I was saying about the contact lenses, it's just adding that extra level that you haven't seen in a lot of zombie movies before. I was very, very proud of that. I would send Tom photos all the time and he was so excited. Tom is like a little kid in a candy store, like he can't wait to see what this is going to look like or what that's going to look like. He's been 150 percent supportive of us doing the job. As far as he's concerned, I was his little ball of clay that has stepped in where he has now gone off to act and direct. There was never once an issue of, oh no, it's not Tom Savini involved. George even said to me, “Maybe TomTom should come up and do a gag just for old time's sake. That would be fun and great.”  When we did From Dusk Till Dawn we kept asking Tom to pump blood just once so we could see the master in action. Tom's like, “I'm an actor now.” So it was great when Tom came up. His enthusiasm has always astounded me. He is still such a fan and he still loves it so much that he would call me and say, “Tell George I had this cool idea, what if we did this?” He's just so into it, so excited that you can't help but have that rub off on you. INTERVIEWER What ideas did Tom come up with? GREG NICOTERO Well, there are a couple of gags that Tom and I came up with. I don't want to say because it's a little bit of a surprise, but let's just say that neither George nor I felt that this zombie movie would be complete without something from Tom Savini. And he was delighted. Next		Home Interviews Antoine Fuqua Interview King Arthur Interview Arv Grewal Interview Asia Argento Interview Behind the Scenes of "War of the Worlds" Bernie Goldmann Interview Clive Owen Interview Dakota Fanning Interview Dennis Hopper Interview George A Romero Interview Greg Nicotero Interview The Hulk Press Conference Ang Lee Press Conference Ioan Gruffudd Interview John Leguizamo Interview Kathleen Kennedy Interview Keira Knightley Interview